


Babes That Live, Babes That Die

by emmaliza



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abortion, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Denial, F/M, Gen, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Infanticide, Infidelity, Internalized Misogyny, Miscarriage, Out of Order, Period-Typical Sexism, Sibling Incest, Stillbirth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-23 01:07:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13179123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmaliza/pseuds/emmaliza
Summary: When Cersei remembers the boy, she always remembers his eyes. Grey, wide, innocent. So much like his father's. She remembers him looking up at her with such absolute love and trust. He must have thought she was his mother.She remembers he did not cry. There was simply a splash and he was gone.





	Babes That Live, Babes That Die

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the valar_morekinks prompt: "Cersei/Ned+Jon AU miserable marriage. I would love to read a Cersei/Ned fic, where their marriage is just slightly less miserable, as the marriage between Cersei and Robert. There is no way Cersei wouldn't have "accidently" killed baby Jon, while keeping suspicion off her, when Ned told her that Jon was going to be raised in Winterfell."

Arya touches her belly all through the pregnancy, grinning, telling her mother how much she can't wait until the baby comes.

Cersei is a little bemused. “I had thought you might be upset,” she says gently. She likes to think her daughter is just like her. “If it's a boy, you won't be heir to Winterfell any longer.”

“I wouldn't make a good Lady of Winterfell anyway,” Arya tells her, pulling a face, and Cersei almost wants to shout at her – how dare her daughter not think she deserves to be heir to her father's lands? “I'm not ladylike. Besides, I've always wanted a brother.”

* * *

When Cersei remembers the boy, she always remembers his eyes. Grey, wide, innocent. So much like his father's. She remembers him looking up at her with such absolute love and trust. He must have thought she was his mother.

She remembers he did not cry. There was simply a splash and he was gone.

* * *

After Ned rode from Casterly Rock to fight the dragons, Cersei thought nothing of procuring a vial of moon tea from her maester. There was nothing cruel in it. Ned Stark might be a Northern dullard, but he was nothing but kind throughout her bedding, and she had no reason to dislike him. Still, he was riding off to a rebellion that was all but doomed. Cersei had no faith that the Baratheons would actually overthrow the Targaryens – the Targaryens had ruled the realm for almost three hundred years now, and she could not imagine any realm where they did not sit the throne. Her father, unusually for him, must have been blinded by his rage to ever make this alliance.

If – when – her husband lost, she could not be the mother of his children. Then she would be a threat, then she would be the woman who watched as King Rhaegar's troops burst into her castle and slaughtered her babes before her very eyes. They would probably kill her too, just to be safe. No, it would not do. She would not die as her father's pawn.

Perhaps in her heart she thought, if she was unburdened by a living husband or children, then once the war was done Rhaegar would look for another woman. If Elia Martell was so unsatisfactory and Lyanna Stark could not give him what he desired, then perhaps he would choose her. As it was always meant to be.

Still, when her moonblood came as always a month after Ned left, without her touching a drop, she couldn't help but be relieved. She did not have to make that choice herself.

* * *

She rode north to Winterfell and found a babe already in the nursery. She did not waste time. She walked straight to Ned's solar and said “I want him gone.”

Ned simply looked at her a long moment, and then said “No.”

“Do you think I'll put up with this?!” she shouted. “I am the daughter of Tywin Lannister, I am a lioness of Casterly Rock, I will not let you humiliate me–”

“You are my wife,” Ned said quietly, with no joy in it. “You have no choice.”

Cersei swallowed her anger. She had been wrong about him. He had been kind throughout their bedding, but it was all an act. He too viewed her as nothing but a pawn, hopeless and helpless, unable to do anything as he paraded his bastards before her.

But Cersei could be patient, and so she did not speak of it again, not until Ned received summons to King Robert's wedding to the Tully girl. Then Cersei insisted she would come with.

* * *

Seeing Jaime again felt almost like a dream, all the love she had ever felt returning, enveloping her. He took her still wearing his white Kingsguard cloak, the cloak her lord husband saw as intolerably stained, and she laughed in delight as she thought of what Ned would think of her cuckolding him – with her own brother, and with his despised Kingslayer.

 _I will never have Ned Stark's children,_ she thought as they made love in the stables, like peasants, while elsewhere Rhaegar's murderer made some fish bitch his queen. _I will never let a man who thought he could dishonour me with his bastards be the father of my children. Only Jaime will ever bring his seed to fruit in me. It is what the gods made us for._ And she moaned in pleasure as Jaime spent deep inside her, siring a bastard of her own.

She lost the babe before they even made it back to Winterfell.

It was by the banks of the Trident she felt her thighs grow wet with blood, and it made her laugh to think she would bleed her child the same place Rhaegar had bled to death.

Before long she found Ned holding her, stroking her hair, keeping her from plunging into the banks of the river. Part of her longed to push him away, to say _get away from me, don't pretend to care, for you already have your son don't you?_ And yet she found herself too weak.

“My lady, I am so sorry,” he whispered as he held her, and Cersei, like the trembling woman she swore she would never be, found herself weeping.

* * *

Winterfell has never liked her, and when word reached the castle of what had happened on the ride from the capital, the gossip was inescapable. _It's the old gods,_ she heard a stablehand whisper. _She can't bear a true Northerner,_ she heard a chambermaid sneer. _The Lannister woman must be barren._

“Who is Jon Snow's mother?” she asked as Ned came to her room one night, as he insisted on doing, hoping to get a true heir out of her. Tansy did not grow well in the North, but Winterfell had glass gardens, and Cersei had her ways. “I deserve to know.”

After all, Snow's mother could be anyone. She'd heard whispers about Ashara Dayne, but that wasn't too much bother – the Dayne girl might have been pretty, but she came from a minor house. Other options were worse. Some cousin of the Baratheons, or the Targaryens. Queen Catelyn, or another daughter of a lord paramount. A proper Northern woman, who could give him a proper Northern heir. She had to know.

Ned's reaction hardly reassured her. She did not know there was that much rage in him. “You need know nothing,” he told her. “Jon is my blood. Nothing else is any concern of yours.”

Hardly two weeks later, Jon Snow was gone.

* * *

Luckily, one of their nurses was infatuated with Ned. It was easy enough to claim she had deluded herself the bastard was his, and when Cersei caught her plotting to steal the babe and flee, she had thrown him into a well rather than lose him to another woman.

Ned didn't seem to believe it at first, but luckily, the girl was also a bit of a slut. Coins only had to make it into a few hands before there was a gaggle of spurned men willing to say they had seen the girl take the child on the day in question. Ned, who believed in nothing more than the honour of Northerners, could hardly bring himself to doubt it.

Lord Stark had to take the girl's head right there in the courtyard. _He who passes the sentence,_ and all that. Cersei stayed in bed that day, and felt a little queasy when she thought on it. She did not watch.

Ned did not speak to her much in the months that followed. He spent long hours down in the crypts below the castle, with his family's stones. But it made no difference. Cersei had put things right, and she would be the mother of any babes to be raised as Ned Stark's. He would never dare slight her so again.

* * *

Once Ned had half-recovered from his mourning, they were invited back to the capital, the king meaning to comfort his friend in his time of need. “My lord, I am so sorry for your loss,” said Queen Catelyn when she greeted Cersei's husband, and Cersei wanted to gouge those stupid blue doe-eyes out of the woman's head. She'd heard King Robert cared little for his wife, still pining for the ghost of Lyanna Stark, and now the whore was probably making a move for Lord Stark instead. Cersei would not stand for it. She might not care for Ned, but he was hers.

Jaime took her in her husband's bed this time, while he was off drinking and remembering with his childhood friend. This babe lasted all the way to Winterfell. It lasted all the way to birth. And yet, after a day of pain Cersei had never known, she found herself holding only a corpse, twisted and mangled and hardly human. Maester Luwin told her it had been a girl, but she did not know how he could tell.

 _A monster,_ all those Northern cretins whispered, of course they did. _The woman is evil inside. She will never bear a living child._

A monster. Cersei thought of Tyrion. But no, this wasn't a monster like her brother, this was her daughter, this was _Jaime's_ daughter, this was the child she was meant to bear. And yet the girl had died within her belly. _Perhaps the Northerners are right. Perhaps I am too evil to bear a living child._

She did not expect Ned to come visit her in her grief, she expected him to pretend it had never happened, like her father would have. But instead he opened her door while her sheets were still bloody, and his face looked as broken as when he heard the news about Jon.

“My lady,” he said, and he could not even finish his sentence before he crumbled before her, and pulled her into his arms.

 _Perhaps this is justice,_ thought Cersei, shocked. _I have murdered his child, and I murdered my own._

And once more, Cersei Lannister – Cersei Stark – found herself weeping in her husband's arms.

* * *

She cannot say she was cursed by the gods for her sin, when after everything grew much better. Ned could never believe she had anything to do with Jon's death, for if he did he would have to kill her – and for a man who had lost every other part of his family, to kill his own wife would drive him to madness,

And if he wouldn't kill her, he would have to learn to love her. It took him time. But slowly, she realised he was growing to know her – not just her beauty, which had always lured men to her like flies to honey, whether she wanted it to or not (and half the time, she wasn't quite sure). But he was growing to know her cynicism and her temper and her bitter wit. Furthermore, he was growing to like those parts of her.

Cersei found it frightening.

He would even discuss matters of state with her, as if she was his trusted adviser, and that was something no man, not even Jaime, had ever done for her before.

Cersei found it intoxicating.

But still, whenever she noticed her moonblood had stopped, she would drink her tea, and it would come again.

* * *

Jaime came to her this time, him and all King Robert's army before they sailed for Pyke. Cersei brought him to her husband's chambers themselves, all but tore his clothes off as she lay back on the pelts. “Come, dear brother,” she told him. “Come fuck an heir to Winterfell into me.”

And Jaime – in what could only be described as an act of divine intervention – hesitated.

“Cersei, you've already lost two of my babes,” he told her. “Are you sure the old gods don't mean you to bear your husband's children?”

Cersei gawped. And then she struck him. It was the only thing she could do – words would not come.

So Jaime left without fucking her that night, or any night before he left. But Ned, Ned did fuck her one more time, still needing an heir. After all, he did not have his bastard to fall back on anymore, should worst come to worst.

And when a month later Cersei's moonblood did not come, she poured her tea out the window.

* * *

Arya is the dearest thing in her life, her own sweet trueborn babe, a girl as wild and strong as herself. Even the Northerners love her, although Cersei suspects they see more Lyanna Stark in her than anything. But still, Arya has softened even how they feel about her. _Well, she can't be all bad, if she gave us our Lyanna back._

Arya might look a Stark, but it is no matter. Cersei will make sure she is every inch a lioness.

People whisper it is unbecoming for a young lady to go about in boy's clothes, to play at swords like a squire, but Cersei will not hear of it. She will not have her daughter reduced to a cunt to be sold off to whatever man is most useful, like she was.

The only thing about her daughter that bothers her is how soft-hearted the girl can be. She supposes it is not so unnatural – the girl has no siblings yet, and so she tries to fill the void with any child she can find. But still, she should know better than to be cavorting with commoners.

One day Cersei catches the girl at swords with a butcher's boy, and she almost beats her daughter blue. It is only the thought of Ned's reaction that stays her hand. “I never want to see you with that boy again, do you understand?!”

“Why?” Arya spits, as stubborn as her mother. “He's my friend!”

“He's _beneath you_.”

It's for the best Cersei killed the bastard. If he lived, she has no doubt Arya would think of him as just her older brother, she would not know better than to trust him. And he would slit her throat for her father's lands. See, Cersei did not murder a child. She saved her daughter's life.

* * *

When Ned returned from the Iron Islands she was still in the birthing bed, and so it took a few weeks before she learned what came of the rebellion. What surprised her the most was to learn Balon Greyjoy still lived. If she ruled the realm, she would have had the man's whole line wiped out. That's what Father would do, after all. But now, Balon still held his rocks, and his last remaining son had been sent to be raised as a ward of the king himself.

Cersei scoffed when Ned told her. “No doubt, he'll slit the princes' throats the second he's able, all on daddy's orders,” she said. King Robert and Queen Catelyn had two sons and a daughter, a perfect family. “But still. If the Tully woman's fool enough to let her husband drag the ironborn wretch under her roof, she deserves everything she gets.”

Ned glared at her. “Queen Catelyn is a kind, generous woman.”

The rebuke stung. _You could learn from her_ went unsaid. But it was no matter. Cersei was Ned Stark's wife, the mother of his only living child, and no-one, not even the queen herself, could take that from her.

* * *

Sometimes, despite herself, Cersei still dreams of all the children she did not have. Jaime's children she lost, Ned's children she got rid of. She dreams of children that were never hers. King Robert's babes and Prince Rhaegar's, and Jon Snow. She could have mothered kings in some other world. Instead, her father had Rhaegar's children, the children she once wanted him to sire on her, slaughtered. Her father was too craven to kill the babes by his own hands, but she wasn't. _Who passes the sentence,_ and all that.

She dreams of Rhaegar's children, crying, bleeding – drowning.

But she wakes, and she finds Arya in her arms, whole and safe and perfect. And she finds her belly full, ready to give her daughter the brother she so craves.

She has her children. She has the children she was meant to have.

* * *

When Ned came back from Pyke, he came straight to her chambers, and found her holding a babe and cooing like the Mother herself.

Ned gasped when he saw his child, and then kissed her brow. Cersei smiled at him. “She looks just like you, my lord,” she said. “The servants say she should be named for your grandmother. She is a girl, of course, but it is no matter. I will give you a son, my lord.”

He gave her a sad smile, and despite all the love and the joy in his eyes, she could see the grief there too. It did not make her angry as it once would have. “Any living child is a blessing,” he said. “...But I would like to have a son.”

And for the first time, she realised how deeply he still hurt. For the first time, she felt his pain as her own.

* * *

Cersei gives her husband two sons and a daughter, just as the queen did. Arya, Bran and Rickon are all any man could ever want, she is sure of it. If the bastard lived, he would just be superfluous. And she still writes to Jaime, she still loves him, she will never stop loving her soul – but if anyone read her letters, they would think her no more than a loving sister. He is a part of her past, as so many things are.

Still, Ned spends long hours in the crypts, in front of his sister's tomb. “What do you two talk about?” she jibes once.

And instead of growing angry, Ned answers.

“Broken promises.”


End file.
